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Entries for the ‘Book Reviews’ Category

Having completed Catch 22 a month ago, it was time to pick up a new book. I’d asked for a Wolf In White Van during Christmas. John Darnielle is one of my all time favorite writers, but only as a singer songwriter in the Mountain Goats. His song writing is truly exceptional, taking [...]

Over the last few months, I’ve been reading Catch 22 by Joseph Heller.
It’s a longer book, with a meandering storyline initially which follows the wartime travails of John Yossarian in the waning missions of WWII. John is a pilot flying missions dropping bombs and avoiding shrapnel fire from the land defenses over which he and [...]

Perhaps Herman Hesse’s most famous work, Siddhartha is a short, but intense story of one man’s life.
I’ve only read one other book by Hesse — Steppenwolf. They are starkly different books. Siddhartha is very much a confident and exuberant individual initially, and sees life as a book meant to be opened and interpreted freely. He [...]

John Gardner created an antihero explanation of Beowulf most memorable villain in 1971.
For those of you unfamiliar with Beowulf (I’ve never read it), it’s renowned as an incredibly important poem due to being the oldest known existing poem from English literature. For an easy, and entertaining way to understand the story, you can watch the [...]

It has been very slow in terms of posts lately. The main reason is that I don’t sit down at my computer downstairs much any more, and can’t really type on an iPad or other device in such a manner that makes writing posts time efficient. I’m considering getting a personal laptop in the future, [...]

I began reading Dune while in Belize. It is an epic tale of a prescient son who would become leader of a foreign sand planet, Arrakis (or Dune, to outsiders.)
The characters and ideas presented in this book are very unique. It covers off on the interesting side of interplanetary economics, biology and science. It adds [...]

A good friend had told me about Cormac McCarthy some years ago and it’s taken me a while to actually pick up any of his works. After scanning Amazon, it seemed like The Border Trilogywas a good place to start. Turns out that premonition was correct, it is quite good.
The first of three novels is [...]

Harper Lee wrote a fantastic book back in 1960. Apparently she still makes $9000 per day from it today.I’ve read it before, when I was in junior high school, but had since forgotten most of the plot. The fact that it was in the deep south and was about an older time was about all [...]

It’d been a while since starting to read children’s books, so it was time to switch it up and read something out of the ordinary. Being from central Minnesota and having heard so much about Garrison Keillor due to working in St. Paul, it was time to see what all the hype was about.
First seeing the [...]

Another double book review. But first, an explanation of why.
Two weeks ago, Teresa and I took off to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for a family vacation with her parents and siblings. The coast there is really something to see. There are large spans of sand, roughly 100 yards, from the shore to large [...]